mediumships

Mediumship is the claimed ability of a person, a medium, to communicate with spirits of the deceased or with other non-physical entities. Practices associated with mediumship include speaking through the medium during séances, trance or automatic writing, and, in historical accounts, attempts to manifest physical phenomena such as raps, levitation, or ectoplasm.

Historical development of mediumship is closely tied to the spiritualist movement of the 19th century, which emerged in the United States and Britain. Public séances, publications, and psychical research popularized the idea that the living could receive messages from the dead. Notable mediums include Daniel Dunglas Home, a 19th‑century figure famed for alleged levitation and materialization, and Stainton Moses, a prominent trance medium; Margery, an early 20th‑century personality, also attracted attention within psychical circles.

Mediumship employs several modalities: trance or speaking through a sitter; clairaudience or clairvoyance in which impressions are relayed; and automatic writing in which the medium writes without conscious control. Physical phenomena reported in some séances—such as table tipping or materialization—were central to early spiritualist demonstrations but have been controversial.

Assessment by skeptics and investigators has emphasized the absence of reliably verified evidence for communication with the dead. The Society for Psychical Research and other researchers exposed many cases as fraud or misinterpretation, while some reports remained inconclusive. Modern parapsychology continues to study related questions, but has not produced widely accepted, reproducible results that confirm mediumship.

Today, mediumship persists in some spiritualist churches and new‑age communities, often offering emotional comfort or guidance to adherents. It remains controversial in the wider scientific community, where demonstrations of verifiable communication with spirits are lacking and ethical concerns about exploitation and deception are discussed.